"'Tis a great blessing to know that you'm fully returned to the use of all your parts, I'm sure. It encourages us old chaps to hear of such recoveries. Do you call yourself perfectly well again yet?" "Well as ever I was. 'Twasn't doctor, but the missis told me when I'd recovered. One day, without any warning, as I comed in from the fowls for my drop of beef tea, which I'd got rather to rely upon, she said there wasn't none, and she went on to add that I was 'a dare-devil old Gubbins, and would eat us all out of hearth and home, if she'd let me.' So then I knowed I was cured." "A great female, Phil." "She is; yet here and there, to say it without any bad meaning, I often wish she wanted more sleep. I'm a hog for sleep--'tis my nature to be so. I like ten hours when I can get it; but she--she don't cry out for more sleep than a bird takes in summer. I've knowed her talk till light scores an' scores of times. And she stops gradual, not sudden. She'll drop remarks, on and on and on--like a bell tolling for death, or a cock crowing. She don't snore, thank God--which shows how one evil be balanced against another, come to think of it." "The human snore cuts to the ear-drum almost afore any other sound," declared Mr. Huggins. "For my part I can go on through thunder or the elements like a new-born child; but my wife was a great midnight trumpeter. Cotton-wool's a good thing against it." "What be you going to call your brace o' boys, Weekes, Junior?" asked Mr. Pearn. He had just returned home, and now appeared behind his bar and renewed a subject that was already exhausted. "Damn my brace of boys," retorted Weekes brutally. "I don't want to hear no more about my brace of boys for the present. Give me a drop of whisky." Noah Pearn obeyed and laughed. "Dare say you wish they was a brace of birds instead of boys--then you could eat 'em and have done with them." "Pearn!" said Mr. Churchward. "I'll thank you to be more careful. A jest is a jest, and I believe I am considered as quick to laugh at a piece of wholesome fun, within the limits of propriety, as any man; but it ill becomes the head of a family, like you, to say such a thing. That is not a gentlemanly joke, but simple coarseness, and you ought to know a great deal better." "Sorry," answered Mr. Pearn. "I stand corrected." "Their names are already decided upon," continued the schoolmaster. "Very much to my gratification one tender bud is going to be called 'Adam'--after me, rather than the original father of the human race; and the other will be called 'Jarratt,' after his father. So much is settled. They will each bear a second Christian name, but these have not yet been decided upon. I may mention that I was the only member of the family who was not astonished at this circumstance." "Why not?" asked Jacob Taverner.